CommentsXp Best movie ever!

ChicRawIdol A brilliant film that helped define a genre

Mandeep Tyson The acting in this movie is really good.

Bob This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

furoredidio I saw Executive Action (E.A.) when it came out. My impression was that I was viewing a first rate dramatic documentary and not "entertainment", not in the common sense of the word. This is an important point since you associate Hollywood with entertainment, and certainly not with the refutation of the official Warren Commission explanation that the assassination of JFK was the work of a lone assassin, and furthermore hypothesizing about a conspiracy converging upon Texas to assassinate the President of the United States, all the while keeping a straight face. There are exceptions of course and you do run into fine films such as "The quiet American" (1958), "The Manchurian Candidate" (1962), "Seven days in May" (1964) and a few others that, even though possessing a particularly strong factual base, in the end are softened with a good dose of the dramatic, typical of the familiar fiction, based on true events. We usually end up assuring ourselves: it's all really fiction in the end. It's only a movie...But E.A. was a different sort of critter. It belongs to a special period in Hollywood, known as the New Hollywood. A period greatly influenced by the counterculture of the 60's, the civil rights struggle, the anti- Vietnam War protests, the baby boomers and rock and roll, and much more. So while Hollywood remained true to its bottom-dollar dogma, many of their more adventurous and creative artists and technicians, young and old, often worked at the fringes of the studios fueling the development of the growing independent film movement. E.A.'s screenplay was written by Dalton Trumbo, the most famous of the Blacklist veterans, inspired by attorney Mark Lane's well researched work "Rush to Judgment" and backed by a twelve member research team. This was an explosive project and studios kept their distance away from it. Press releases at the time claimed that threats were being made to the crew and stated that they had had to resort to filming in secrecy. It is a wonder its short-lived distribution ever materialized at all. Soon, this curious, lone, courageous and eloquent narrative illustrating the conspiracy to assassinate the President of the United States disappeared from sight.From 1979 through the 1990s many official documents were declassified and made public generally strengthening the conspiracy thesis. In 1992 Oliver Stone collected a handful of the most likely of those conspiracy theories in his very popular "JFK". The 1990s were a particularly revealing decade with many well researched documentaries -with limited distribution- being produced. The Assassination Records Collection Act, the National Archives and the Assassination Records Review Board collectively made public thousands of classified documents. And by the first decade of the new millennium a host of local and foreign researchers were publishing well documented books detailing possible scenarios that pointed to specific conspirators. (In 2007 the DVD version of "Executive Action" was released). To this day some remaining classified documents are still expected to appear. The point is that, today the more informed consensus appears to agree with E.A., that president Kennedy's assassination was a well orchestrated coup d'état but without formal legal proof as to the identity of participants. There likely never will be.As I watch E.A. again, I am still amazed by how a film, made in the early 70s, managed such a clear and unambiguous reconstruction of events, and have yet to see a more plausible or convincing explanation of what happened in 1963 in any other dramatic film. Executive Action lives on as the curiosity it always has been, an explosive film, well ahead of its time.Find it on Apple iTunes, Google Play Movies, Vudu, Amazon Instant Video or Microsoft Store.

atlasmb "Executive Action" provides an alternate explanation for the evidence surrounding the assassination of President John Kennedy. Released only 10 years after JFK's death--too soon for the public to accept it--it was a box office flop. But its use of both dramatized scenes and archival footage provides an interesting, though controversial, story written by the talented Dalton Trumbo.Much of the conspiracy theory is similar to Oliver Stone's "JFK", and it does a good job of integrating known evidence (such as witness reports and information we know about Lee Harvey Oswald) and nearly mythologized explanations of the assassination (like the "grassy knoll").Starring Burt Lancaster, Robert Ryan (in his penultimate film) and Will Geer as the three men who organize the hit, the film carries an emotional content for anyone who lived through the event in 1963. It also serves as an indictment of the Secret Service and the Dallas Police Department, criticizing their sloppy procedures and their unprofessional methods.Though many people have accepted the Warren Commission's lone gunman explanation, conspiracy theorists abound even now, especially since some of the evidence is difficult to explain.As we view the film today, it is nearly amusing to hear the conspirators say, in ignorant naivete, that JFK's reputation and personal life are smear proof. But the mystical spell of "Camelot" that surrounded the Kennedys and his presidency was still in place at the film's initial release in 1973.

Ange Kenos Could Prescott Bush have been the right wing politician? Certainly the movie plays a pivotal role in convincing even some of its stars - Donald Sutherland and Robert Ryan - that the plot line could have been very close to what did happen that fateful November when a President was gunned down under very mysterious circumstances. It also proves why one shooter had little chance of pulling it off, especially with the Italian Manlicher rifle, but "triangulated co- ordinated fire" could easily succeed. But, have you ever read the info sheet that came out with the movie? And how many witnesses dies within 3 years. And the enormous odds of that happening? Sais a great deal to me.

Lechuguilla The film's thesis is that JFK was assassinated as a result of a conspiracy of wealthy men. In the title sequence, the producers admit that: "much of this film is fiction, much of it is also based on documented historical fact. Did the conspiracy we describe actually exist? We do not know. We merely suggest that it could have existed". In other words, the film's rationale is based on skepticism of the Warren Commission's lone-gunman theory.The three main characters, the villains, are Farrington (Burt Lancaster), Foster (Robert Ryan), and Ferguson (Will Geer), all suits, VIPs, presumably industrialists. But we're never told explicitly who they are or what they represent. Farrington is apparently the mastermind, the one who proposes that "the only possible (successful) scenario is three rifles with triangulated fire".Much of the dialogue consists of background information taken from historical government records related to Oswald and Kennedy's policies, and is therefore largely exposition. It's as if the film is giving viewers a history lesson. As a result, some of the dialogue sounds canned, scholastic, bookish.Casting is adequate. But acting is very, very wooden. Sometimes the cast acts like they're reading their lines off of cue cards.Color cinematography is conventional, though adequate. B&W newsreel footage of JFK, his speeches, the crowds that followed him, his arrival in Dallas, and Oswald permeates the film's plot, and gives the film a factual, semi-documentary look and feel. Some good aerial shots of Dealey Plaza lend authenticity to the story. And that moment when the motorcade enters the kill zone is quite dramatic, absent dialogue and music.Viewers who cling to the lone-gunman theory will hate this film. Viewers who believe in a conspiracy will probably prefer Oliver Stone's more recent, and more compelling film, "JFK" (1991). Back in the 1970s, "Executive Action" was the go-to film for those interested in this historical series of events. Now, the film seems very dated.